and the direction was center

In the swirling of fresh waters I saw your name. 

and the name was 絆 

and the name was 絆 

and the name was 絆.

I woke with darkness, the last star just fading from the sky, and found in my belly a turning of a great mass shifting on its axis. That movement created a surge of energy that rose my body from its weighted slumber. I let it rush out to sea, taking with it the debris of dying worlds. In that great turning, I felt the string that had been floating loose and tangled within me, that confusion chewing parasitically at the feeding ground of my greatest power, begin to unwind from itself and tauten until sharp like an arrow. I found that with the distillation of my mind, I could choose the direction in which to point it.

In the upper part of my chest where my heart meets the conduit of expression, my collarbones hold the keys to the gateway out of a dying kingdom. I allow all that is untrue within me to lay down and die. To be relieved of suffering by the sacred fire, to lose its life in the most blessed surrender, to go back to the center of the earth where it can be forged anew into a form that will serve this world.

The prayer is to keep shedding you. The prayer beneath the prayer is to reassemble my bones to crisscross at the center of me, forming a hoop where a fire can grow. Into that fire gets thrown handfuls of cedar and the many bodies of pain my water has been holding all day, all of life, many lifetimes.

 A body of pain goes toward the absence, a body of pain longs for what hurts, each tributary flowing upward against gravity, toward a cold damp waterless ocean of sorrow. A pain body is ready to die. Crackle under a fire’s purple heat, my pain body becomes brittle, loses its density, is filled with heat until it is fire alone, a glowing ember, then, charcoal with which one can design a new story. 

I invite only what will support me to serve this world back into my body now, at this time. In the spaciousness I’ve created there is a hollow into which to whisper new incantations. The first word will always be kizuna, the creation of a new cellular world older. My rope in your rope, we pull and find that the whole ship tightens, pointed in a clear direction.

And the direction was clear to us. 

And the direction was center.